Changes of Designers' Roles Based on Self-organizing Design Institutions

摘要

The designer is the core dominating force of a design activity. In industrial society, production conditions with machining as the core have made the design activity a small part of production and established a design - manufacture mechanism in which the designer can play a role only in some links. This paper tries to build a model about distributed self-organizing design institutions in the information era, displaying how designers complete their work in this more flexible system: not only design work but also other work required by project operation, which should have been assumed by other departments or employees in a traditional enterprise organizational structure. In the new design organization, designers are no longer a role being employed and managed. Instead, they can work more freely, actively and creatively.